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Lost love darkened Landseers vision

HIS brooding paintings of majestic stags in their death throes and doom-laden Highland landscapes have become icons of the Victorian age.

Now it has emerged that Sir Edwin Landseer’s lavish studies of death, defiance and virility were inspired by the ageing artist’s unrequited love for a Scottish aristocrat more than 20 years his junior.

Richard Ormond, the curator of the current National Galleries of Scotland exhibition — Monarch of the Glen: Landseer in the Highlands — has unearthed unpublished letters from the artist that reveal his twilight years were clouded by heartbreak.

Landseer, who was Queen Victoria’s favourite artist, is known to have suffered a mental breakdown and to have been regarded as difficult in later life due to recurring depression.

However, dozens of letters uncovered by Ormond reveal that he struck up a flourishing romance with Lady Louisa Stewart Mackenzie, a flamboyant aristocrat with literary aspirations whose friends included Charles Dickens